Life Support
by the.goal.is.greatness
Summary: Enjoy yourself today. Tomorrow may never come at all. [McCoy x OC]


**Title:** Life Support  
**Genre:** Romance / Humor  
**Rating:** M  
**Pairing:** McCoy x OC  
**Spoilers:** N/A  
**Summary:** Enjoy yourself today. Tomorrow may never come at all.  
**Word Count:** 4,691  
**Warnings:** Fast relationship is fast.

**Disclaimer:** _Star Trek_ is not mine. The summary is also a quote from _Star Trek: The Original Series_.

**A/N:** McCoy needs love, too.

* * *

_Damn that allergy-ridden, child_! McCoy thinks to himself as he hurls through the hallways of the Enterprise, running pell-mell down to the transporter room. The gargled message they'd received from Spock just minutes before had been hard to make out. But he'd heard enough words to feel his stomach drop. "Captain" and "sacrificed" and "bleeding." _He better not die so I can kill him myself!_

When he skids around the corner and the doors slide open, he's two steps into the room before his mind processes what he's seeing. Spock is conversing in hushed tones with two members of the away team, two science officers who are dirty and shaking but, at a preliminary glance, don't appear to be injured besides shock and fatigue. It's the crumbled mess of bodies on the floor that draw his immediate attention.

Jim is flat on his back, eyes wide and blind with pain. He's taking in great, gasping breaths, as if he cannot get enough air into his lungs. But his hands are clenched in a firm, white-knuckled grip on the wrists of the green-tinged woman kneeling above him. McCoy doesn't know who she is, he's not familiar with that many of the security officers to know her name or anything about her. What he does recognize is that her eyes are wide and panicked and that her arms are red with blood up to her elbows as she presses them against the gaping hole in Jim's chest.

"What happened?" He demands, kneeling beside them, no time to move him, no time for pleasantries.

She glances at him, still terrified. "Natives had some sort of grenade attached to their arrows. He took a shot meant for one of the science officers."

One of the officers behind them lets out a sob, so McCoy assumes it had been her. He hums at her answer, running the tricorder frantically over Kirk's chest, one hand grasping his friend by the shoulder in a show of reassurance. "Missed your heart, kid, you lucky bastard."

"Janna… pushed me… away…"

"Don't talk." Brown eyes flick up to the woman across from him, arms shaking as they still remained pressed to the wound. "You must be Janna." It wasn't a question, but she nodded anyway, eyes focused on her task. "You probably saved his life." At that her eyes flicked up to his startled, and he saw that her eyes were a deep and clear shade of emerald. "Thank you."

* * *

McCoy focuses all of his attention the next few weeks on making sure his friend and captain lives without reopening his wound by diving headfirst into another away mission, and barely gives the security officer another thought. Not until she comes into Sick Bay two weeks after the incident, looking uncertain and lost.

"Janna, right?" She jolts in surprise, whether from his sudden voice, or the fact that he remembered her name, McCoy couldn't say. "Something for you?"

"I was… looking for the Captain."

McCoy points her in the direction of Jim's bed and watches as she heads over, shaking his head at all the females that seemed to drape themselves over the boy. Janna was just Jim's type, too. Tall, probably just Kirk's height, lithe, and leggy, with a mass of dark ebony hair that fell across her shoulders like lines of spilled ink. He'd mistaken the tone of her skin during the accident as nausea, but now he could see it was biology. Her smooth skin was tinted the lightest shade of verdant green.

"Janna! How's my best security officer been holding up without me?"

McCoy frowns. His best security officer?

There's a husky laugh, at complete odds with her delicate appearance, and it has a pleasant, rasp to it that McCoy immediately likes. "Boring without you, Captain, as always."

"Come on, Janna," Kirk whines. "Can't you call me Jim?"

"Nope." McCoy doesn't need to see her face or know her to know that she's grinning at the Captain, he can hear it in her voice. "People would definitely get the wrong idea."

"What, like that you saved my life more times than I can count and you're the reason we come back uninjured half the time?" She makes a dismissive noise through her nose, and McCoy hears the bed creak. He starts to make his way over to them, hoping to keep the Captain from getting too riled up. "Come _on_ Janna! You still don't think people will use your," McCoy walks around the partition just in time to see Jim back some overzealous air quotes, "creepy Orion pheromones on me, do you?"

She's barely opened her mouth to respond, when McCoy's startled outburst cuts through the air. "_Orion_?"

She jumps, almost falling off the bed, and only Jim's sudden grip around her waist stops her from tumbling forward to the floor. She looks hesitant, Jim looks surprisingly irritated. "Bones!"

McCoy has known him long enough to know that look his eye – a valiant captain coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress. He huffs. "Didn't know we had any Orions on board, don't have the necessary medical supplies for that."

She reaches out to place a placating hand on Jim. "I'm only half Orion, Doctor, so it's not necessary to stock the standard items."

He stares at her for a long moment. "You've had the proper medical tests?"

"Yes, Nurse Chapel conducts all of my physicals at my personal request."

He huffs again, before leaning down to grab Jim's chart from the foot of the bed. "Don't make his pull his stiches or I'll make you redo them." And that's that.

* * *

McCoy doesn't look up her file because he's nosy, he does it because he wants to make damn sure she _is_ actually getting physicals from his head nurse. She is. Janna, half Orion security officer, stationed aboard the Enterprise when they left for their five year mission into the dark, empty, void of space. She's allergic to peanuts. How novel and quaint after years of Jim. She's been on practically every away mission with the Captain the past six months, a time during which McCoy _had_ noticed a marked decrease in injuries and general hullabaloo.

For someone that James T. Kirk has nicknamed "the best security officer in the Fleet" McCoy sees basically none of her. She's never in the mess hall, never on the Holo Deck request form, never on the bridge. He never runs into her in the hallway or the transporter room. And he never sees her in Sick Bay, even after missions Jim mentions her being on.

"Does that woman even _live_ on this ship?"

Jim blinks, fork halfway to his mouth. "… What?"

_Shit_. He'd definitely said that last part out loud. "Your Orion friend, Janna. You've mentioned her after every one of your missions and though I treated security officers from _several_ of those trips –" ("But not me!" Jim pips up.) " – I haven't seen her."

Jim shrugs. "Janna never gets injured."

McCoy frowns. "Everyone gets injured, especially when they're with _you_."

Not seeming to notice the tone, he says, "Not Janna." Suddenly those blue eyes light up and McCoy wishes he were literally anywhere else. "Why you wanna know, Bones?" His tone has taken on a positively suggestive lilt. "You trying to give her a physical?"

He snorts, flustered at the thought. "Don't be ridiculous, kid, I don't even know her."

"Oh, so if you _did_ know her?"

"Shove it, Jim!"

"I can tell you all about her!" His friend blatantly ignores his demands that he shut the hell up and continues to talk. "She reads all kinds of fancy books and shit, her and Spock loan each other crap like a book club." He makes a face.

"Jim, I don't care."

"And before she joined Starfleet her family enrolled her in the Orion Academy of Fine Arts for Dance."

_Really?_ "I still don't care."

"She can drink whiskey like a sailor."

"I don't – really?"

"So you _are_ interested!"

"Jim!"

* * *

That's precisely how McCoy finds himself tacked onto an away mission five days later on a team that, surprise, surprise, includes Janna. She eyes him strangely, no doubt wondering why the CMO is being dragged down planet-side. "Doctor." She inclines her head at him in greeting. But then his molecules are being _ripped apart_ and careening down towards a planet at a molecular level so who really cares.

The planet is pretty, in a _Tarzan at the Earth's Core_ kind of way. You know the ancient text where an ape-man from the jungle travels to the earth within the earth, that's populated with dinosaurs and giant insects and hostile natives and big, beautiful, untouched forests? No? Well, it was like that.

So it was only about an hour in before they found themselves scattered and separated and running for their lives and _this_ was why he hated First Contact. And Jim. And space.

McCoy is jogging through the forest, trying to be on the lookout for the _giant fucking praying mantis_ that had attacked them, when he's careened into from the side by something going a hundred miles per hour. He feels the breath rush out of him in a painful whoosh and, before he can even pull the thought together to draw his phaser, he's hit the ground with a thud and a tangle of limbs on top of him. When they roll to a halt, he opens his eyes to a mass of blackness. He blinks. But then the darkness recedes and he realizes that Janna has crashed into him and is currently struggling to regain both her footing and her breath as she sprawls on top of him.

"… what?" He wheezes out.

She blinks down at him, distracted, eyes darting behind her, as she battles to her feet. He ignores the breasts pressed firmly against his chest for a sudden moment, the legs tangled with his in an endless sprawl, the hair come loose from its regulation bun to brush against his face. Ignores it. She's tugging him up and away now. "Hurry… run…"

"Jim…" He's letting himself be tugged after her, but she's in much better shape than he is. She runs like a deer, long-limbed and quick; she's visibly dragging him along.

"I don't... know…"

McCoy has a stitch in his side that as piercing as an arrow, but he forces himself along behind her. He promises himself that when they get back to the ship he is definitely giving Jim something that going to make his dick turn purple for bringing him down here. Hah. A yell causes Janna to stumble when they both immediately recognize the voice. He's opening his mouth to tell her they have to help, but she stops on a dime. She stares at him sternly, "Go to the rendezvous point. I'll get the Captain." And then she's off again.

_Oh, like fucking hell_, he thinks and runs off after her.

He stumbles, literally stumbles, into a clearing 100 yards off, tripping and landing in between the strangest standoff he's ever seen. Janna is standing in front of Jim, her arms outstretched, blocking him from view. On the other side, directly in front of a dead _giant fucking praying mantis and really what the fuck is with this place_ is a group of terrifying natives. Men whose motto seemed to be "more piercings, less clothing." If it hadn't been such a clear cut life-or-death situation, the tandem looks of complete and utter exasperation on Jim and Janna's faces at him as he literally tumbles in between the standoff at the OK Corral would have been comical.

As it was though, the natives started screaming and brandishing sharp and pointed spears and bow and arrows at him. One particularly twitchy one was twirling a dagger at looking at the sprawled out McCoy with ill-concealed contempt. He starts an undignified scuttle backwards towards his crew. No shame.

"Stop." The voice, calm and serene made not only McCoy, but every single indigenous male freeze. "Can't you see we mean you no harm?" There was no possible way they understood her, the language they had been chirping at each other sounded more like bird calls than anything else, but they all stood staring at her in slack-jawed adoration. McCoy jerked when he felt cool hands grip him by the arms and help him to his feet. When he stood, he found himself standing next to Janna. They were of a height with each other, her eyes just level with her nose. Her face was very close to his, but focused completely on the hostiles ahead of them. "We're very nice people, can't you see that?" Her voice was mellifluous, lilting in a hypnotic manner, as elegant as a dance. "I only want to get to know you, to be friends with you, to be close to you." McCoy hardly noticed that he was swaying closer to her. _Yeah, that sounds swell…_ "We could be friends, doesn't that sound nice?" _Sounds fucking fantastic_, he thinks, leaning closer.

"Three to beam up."

And the trio disintegrates.

* * *

"You doin okay, Bones?"

Another empty shot glass slams against his desk, only to be immediately refilled by the doctor. "I'm great. Perfect. Fucking great." He downs the whiskey with a grimace. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Uh, well, you've been kind of crotchety since that mission…"

"The one where you almost _killed me_?"

"Technically that was the natives, not me. How was I to know that would happen? Besides, Janna saved us." Keen blue eyes watch McCoy deliberately pour and then down another shot. "That's really not what's bothering you is it?" Those eyes watch him for another long moment and Bones can see the wheels in that head turning like a well-oiled machine. "It's Janna." McCoy makes a flustered, confused face at his friend. "Does it really bother you that much that's she's Orion?"

"No, of course not! I'm a doctor, Jim. And too used to green hobgoblins to care about a little more green on this ship."

"Then…" McCoy shuts his eyes against the inevitable as those eyes widen and light with realization. Stupid, good-for-nothing genius. "You _liked it!" _He's positively gleeful when the doctor's cheeks flush a ruddy red. "You did! Holy shit you've got a crush on my best security officer!"

"Fucking voodoo officer, is what she is," Bones mutters.

Jim pretends not to hear. "Oh, this is _great_! Janna's awesome! She's just what you need to lighten up your life – and _hot, _too!" He laughs. "You need any help, old man? I'm pretty sure flirting isn't what it was in your day anymore." His eyes are shining.

"Oh, shut the hell up kid."

* * *

For someone that McCoy had recently thought he saw _nothing_ of, she sure seemed to be _everywhere_ now. She's in the mess hall when he is. She's trailing behind Jim when he wanders the halls. She's getting a physical with Chapel _the moment_ his shift starts.

"Are you following me?!"

Emerald eyes blink at him in astonishment when she steps onto the turbolift he's on. "… I beg your pardon?"

He immediately feels like an ass at his outburst and gets flustered. "I mean…"

She blinks at him again. "I'm going to get into the lift now." And she does so, still eyeing him strangely.

He fidgets when her hand hits the button for Deck 3, the same place he's going. His conversation with Jim is still so fresh in his mind. He's not old, but he's definitely too old to be this rattled and nervous around a woman. No matter how beautiful she was. No matter how long her legs were, or how perfectly the flare of her hips looked like it would fit in his hands, or how her breasts – "How's the Captain?"

"What?" He comes back to the here and now with a jerk. "Oh, kid's fine." He scoffs. "Came back from the last mission looking a little worse than usual though." He glances at her side-eyed. "What's a matter? Your skills of persuasion not work that day?"

"The hostiles he was facing were all women."

Her answer is blunt, to-the-point. But he doesn't follow. "… Huh?"

She turns her head towards him. "While my father is an Orion, my mother is a human, so my skills are much… diluted." McCoy is still staring at her blankly. "I can only persuade those who are attracted to me."

The world comes to a screeching halt around him as he remembers the sound of her velvety voice crooning _I only want to get to know you_. He remembers the lure to turn his face into the curve of her shoulder just to hear her speak. Remembers how fiercely and quickly his body had responded to the sound of _I only want to be close to you_ spoken so low and husky and close. He's throbbing just thinking about it now.

"Doctor?" Her voice sounds concerned, but he's seeing her through the haze of a lust-addled mind, so only half-hears her. He had thought she _made_ him feel those things. "It's not really intentional and I don't like to do it." But it had been him all along. "That's why I only try and use it when the situation really calls for it, and never on my friends." She makes a wry noise and he wants to hear more of them. "But when the Captain was corned by all of those females… it doesn't work as well…" And Jim? Did the captain hear her voice the way he did? The thought made him illogically jealous. "Luckily the captain is… um… amorous?" She says the word hesitantly, as if afraid of offending. "So I could talk him away from them and – "

The thought of her crooning directly to Jim in that throaty voice, just for him, luring him closer and closer to her and her big eyes and soft lips, makes the haze of red flare white-hot inside his skin. He's two steps closer and crowding her against the wall before he makes the conscious decision to move, his hands braced on either side of her, his face close, closer, closest, until he can swallow down the rest of those words right down his throat.

The sound of the door sliding open behind them as the lift halts, shocks him into pulling away with a yank. She's staring at him with wide eyes, her cheeks flushed a ruddy green, lips just barely beginning to bruise from the force of his kiss. She looks positively sinful.

McCoy has time for one crystal clear thought before he bolts. _Oh fuck me._

* * *

He avoids her like the plague, which is surprisingly easy even confined in a tin can in the middle of goddamn space. He's remarkable successful at it for two entire weeks until the bane of his existence, James T. Kirk, storms into his office in a whirl of emotion. "Bones, what the actual fuck?"

The doctor pauses mid-motion as Jim hurtles in and slams his hands down on the desk. "What?"

"You think you can just _ghost_ my best security officer and I won't – "

"Don't call her that."

The growl makes the torrent of words stumble to a halt as Jim blinks at him confused. "What? But she is the best."

McCoy is staring at him in abject horror. He hadn't been opposed to the idea of Jim calling her the best. His forceful snarl had been in opposition to Jim calling her _his_. _Literal fuck me._

"Bones…?" Jim jumps when the doctor's head hits the desk with a thud. "Holy shi – are you okay?"

"I think I'm fucked, Jimmy." He lifts his head to blink blearily at his friend. "I think… I think I might like Janna."

And Jim grins as bright as Christmas morning.

* * *

Jim Kirk is a terrible matchmaker. He doesn't bother trying to engineer a situation for them to "accidentally" run across each other. He doesn't try and stage a situation where McCoy can rescue her, or their requests for the Holodeck miraculously overlap. He doesn't mix up Chapel's shift so Bones has to give Janna her physical. Nope, what he does is this: He requests the pair of them for an away mission to an M-Class planet that McCoy is _pretty effing sure_ Spock said was uninhabited. The trio of them appear planetside in an idyllic little meadow.

"Jim, what the – "

But he's already grinning. "Alright, Spock, hit me." And then he beams away, leaving the pair of them staring at each other in confusion and dawning horror.

"That little fuck." He already knows their communicators won't work.

Janna turns to him with a start, cheeks flushed, but voice all business. "We should find shelter, or at least running water. There's no telling how long the Captain will leave us here."

"Probably until I kiss you again," McCoy mutters under his breath.

"What?"

"Nothing. Let's go."

He stalks off, not bothering to wait, knowing she'll fall into step beside him. The silence between them is awkward and tense, McCoy can't stop thinking about the last time he was alone with her, about the brief, harsh, press of lips, about the momentary slide of his chest against hers. About how if he had just had another moment he could have seen if she would have tipped her head back at him in blissful surrender –

"… I'm sorry."

He stumbles when she speaks abruptly. "Sorry for what?"

"For making you uncomfortable with my… talent."

McCoy stops so suddenly that Janna crashes into him. He grasps her by the shoulders as he turns. "Uncomfortable?" A month of tangled, confused emotions suddenly snap inside of him. "_Uncomfortable?_" She's staring at him in confusion. "Jesus woman, you can't imagine how uncomfortable you make me." And he hauls her to him, those last few inches, and slants his mouth down over hers in a bruising clash of teeth and tongue. She stiffens against him and the motion only serves to arch her against him more fully, making it extremely obvious how much he's enjoying having her pressed against him.

He breaks the kiss with a ragged groan. "You see how _uncomfortable_ you make me, darlin?" She's panting harshly, her eyes wide. She raises a trembling hand to her lips and only his keen doctor's eyes notice how her pupils are blown – not with fear, but with something else. "I can't stop thinking about your… talent," the word is almost intelligible as he arches against her. "I can't stop thinking about your voice and your fucking legs and – " He has a sudden thought that makes him almost dizzy with want " – and I'm wondering if you're green everywhere." She gasps at the thought and he can't help but take the opportunity to kiss her again, to sweep his tongue into her mouth and taste her. And _fuck him_ if she doesn't taste like whiskey. "Jesus Christ, woman." Is it really not enough that she's sexy and intelligent and funny and keeps his best friend alive, but she has to taste like _whiskey_, too? What was she, tailor made for lonely Georgian bachelors lost in space?

"I – I thought you – " She swallows to catch her breath, her hands fist in the front of his shirt, the only thing holding her vertical. "I didn't believe the Captain when – "

McCoy growls, still too worried over the fact that Jim is attracted to her, when he could have any other woman in the galaxy. "What did Jim say?"

She blinks at him, before, wonder of wonders, a small smile twitches at the corner of her mouth and her eyes glimmer up at him impishly. "He said that you had a thing for the color green."

He gapes at her, torn between wanting to be grateful and irritated (because Spock, hello?) but he never has time to formulate a reply.

"I could show you some green." He jolts at the sudden timbre of her voice, gravely and rhythmic. "I could show you all sorts of things." She smiling at him, hesitantly at first, but then with a greater confidence as his pupils blow so wide his eyes are black and he licks his suddenly dry lips. "Wouldn't you like that?" She's tilting her head up in invitation, just like he'd imagined, and really, what southern gentleman refuses an invitation from a lady. "We could be close." She breaths the words against his mouth and he makes a garbled noise that is completely involuntary. "I could show you how far down this green goes." As she purrs out the words on a sighs, she undulates against him in encouragement and that's too much for him.

There's a flurry of movement and suddenly they're on the ground, loose-limbed and sprawling, with McCoy nestled snuggly between her uniformed thighs and only wishing that they were naked. _I sound like fucking Jim_. But then Janna laughs and the motion ripples through him as perfectly as anything and he forgets what he was thinking. Everything after is a blur of moments that are imprinted into his mind like photographs –

\- limbs as green as grass stretched out under him –

\- a whirlwind of clothing and skirting touches and skin on skin -

\- the taste of whiskey on his lips, the sound of sighs in his ears –

\- fingers clenching in the dirt, his hands leaving bruising imprints on olive thighs, his teeth nipping dark-green contusions onto a collarbone –

\- sliding into hot, wet, heat –

-thighs clamped in a painful grip around his waist as a slender torso arches against him, soft breasts pushing up against his chest –

\- and the sky crashing down around him as he ruts like a teenager in a meadow with a beautiful woman who is clinging to him like he's Casanova –

He's boneless and pliant and dead weight on top of her, but he can't bring himself to move, all he can do is try and breathe and calm his racing heart. _I think I'm having a heart attack._

"That was fun." Janna's voice lilts at him in a seductive Orion murmur. As tired as he is, he feels himself twitch from where he's limp and spent inside her. "Hmm." Her humming isn't near are amorous as the gentle roll of her hips she gives. His mind almost white-outs at the sensation against to too over-sensitized flesh. Her groans into the arc of her shoulder. He can feel her smile against the curve of his head and knows that he's immediately going to be regretful and thrilled in a moment. "Wouldn't you like to _play some more_?"

He's suddenly rock hard inside of her and the sudden surge of six to midnight leaves him delirious with sensation. _Jesus fucking Christ_. Janna gasps at the feeling and he swallows it down. _Damn green skinned witch is going to kill me_.

"Yes… _more_…"

The sound of that sultry voice, hoarse from screaming, and the thick, cloying feel of pheromones and literal witchcraft spewing from her lips makes McCoy give a series of mindless jerks against her, so deep she can probably feel it in her throat. _Fuckfuckfuck_. Her nails are gripping his shoulders hard enough to draw blood but he can't bring himself to care. This is all for him. _It's too good, Jesus, fuck. Ugh_. He can see the allure of Orions. _Holy, shit, God, yesyesfuckyes_. That is if she doesn't kill him.

The sound of his name as she falls is sweeter to him than any Orion-induced compulsion and he grins against her lips as he falls beside her.

_Well, darlin' looks like I owe Jim a drink for hiring the best security officer in the Fleet_…


End file.
